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Quote by Pooja Agnihotri

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Pooja Agnihotri

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“Those who live by the labor of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.”

“The proletariat has not succeeded in negating itself as such - the century and a half since Marx has made that clear. The proletariat has failed to negate itself qua class and thereby abolish class society per se. Perhaps this is because the proletariat never was a class, as had been supposed - because only the bourgeoisie was a true Class, and therefore the only one capable of negating itself as such. For it has indeed negated itself, along with capital, and so generated a classless society, albeit one which has nothing to do with the classless society that was supposed to arise from a revolution and from a negation of the proletariat as such. As for the proletariat, it has simply disappeared - vanished along with the class struggle itself. There can be no doubt that had capitalism developed in accordance with its own contradictory logic, it would have been defeated by the proletariat. In an ideal sense, Marx's analysis is still irreproachable. But Marx simply did not foresee that it would be possible for capital, in the face of the imminent threat to its existence, to transpoliticize itself, as it were: to launch itself into an orbit beyond the relations of production and political contradictions, to make itself autonomous in a free-floating, ecstatic and haphazard form, and thus to totalize the world in its own image. Capital (if it may still be so called) has barred the way of political economy and the law of value; it is in this sense that it has successfully escaped its own end. Henceforward it can function independently of its own former aims, and absolutely without reference to any aims whatsoever. The inaugural event of this mutation was undoubtedly the Great Crash of 1929; the stockmarket crisis of 1987 was merely an aftershock.”

“We saw this contradiction in action in Marx's analysis of struggles over the length of the working day. Individual capitalists, we there discovered, each of them acting in his or her own self-interest and locked in competitive struggle with each other, can produce an aggregative result which goes against their class interest seen as a whole. By their individual action they can endanger the basis for accumulation. And since accumulation is the means whereby the capitalist class reproduces itself, they can endanger the basis for their own reproduction. They are then forced to constitute themselves as a class — usually through the agency of the state — and to put limits upon their own competition. But in so doing they are forced to intervene in the exchange process — in this instance in the labour market -- and thereby to offend the rules of individuality and freedom in exchange.”

“... The Banks, as we now all too well know, must be rescued no matter what. 'The value of commodities is thus sacrificed in order to ensure the fantastic and autonomous existence of this value in money. In any event, a money value is only guaranteed as long as money itself is guaranteed.' Inflation, as we also know, must be kept under control at all costs. 'This is why many millions' worth of commodities have to be sacrificed for a few millions in money. This is unavoidable in capitalist production and forms one of its particular charms.' Use values are sacrificed and destroyed no matter what is the social need. How insane is that?”